Helping Visitors Bookmark Your Site Options

[EGOL]

Getting visitors to bookmark your site is an extremely important thing to do. It helps the visitor remember your site and it might bring the visitor back to your site at some future time - and perhaps hundreds of future times.

A couple of years ago I placed "bookmark this site" buttons on my websites. These buttons triggered a bookmark in the visitors browser. The bookmarking rate improved significantly on all sites.

The button helped bring about a desired visitor action... and I am now getting thousands of visitors per day coming directly to my sites.

More recently I replaced the browser bookmark button with bookmark button from AddThis.com. That service is now collecting a few bookmarks every day.... but I am sure that some of my visitors - perhaps many of my visitors - click that bookark button with the expectation that it will trigger a browser bookmark. (I believe that the visitors to this site are not especially web savvy).

I am not feeling confident about this move because "Bookmark" now has more meanings - and I don't want my visitors clicking a bookmark button (expecting to bookmark in the browser) and then having their mind jump from the topic channel of my website to "hey, what's this bookmark stuff?"!

My best judgement on this would be go back to a "Bookmark this Site" button that triggers a browser bookmark and then add a few of the social bookmarking logo buttons beneath it - or maybe a button that has a few of those logos on it (without the word "bookmark") and that connects to AddThis.com.

I post this here to share what I am doing, but I am also curious about what you are doing to help trigger the bookmarking action in your website visitors? Any great ideas?

This post has been edited by EGOL: May 13 2007, 11:57 AM

[yannis]

My best judgement on this would be go back to a "Bookmark this Site" button that triggers a browser bookmark and then add a few of the social bookmarking logo buttons beneath it - or maybe a button that has a few of those logos on it (without the word "bookmark") and that connects to AddThis.com.

Absolutely. For most visitors bookmark this site means triggering a bookmark in their browser. I would add social bookmarking micro-icons for the rest. It also comes out as more honest.

Yannis

[SEOigloo]

Hi Egol!
I'm glad you brought this topic up. I was actually planning to start a thread on this soon in order to ask a question.

We enabled bookmarks to half a dozen social media sites when we redesigned our blog a few months ago.
However, I don't know how to do this for a regular web page, as what we used for the blog was just a blog plugin we enabled. If anyone has the time, can someone explain to me how this works, what code I need to put in the pages, and in. re. Egol's comment, how does one both allow an old-fashioned bookmark to the browser that most people are aware of as well as the SM bookmarks that the techy crowd so love?

A tutorial on doing this would be really useful to me for a new site I've just launched as a pet project.

Thanks, folks!
Miriam

[eKstreme]

Well there are many angles to this, some of which I blogged about a few days ago (Social Bookmarking How-to). I won't go into how to best lay out social bookmarks as the blog post explains it all.

The other angle is whether to have social bookmarking sites only, browser bookmarking only, both, or simply some text saying "hey, press Control-D to bookmark this!". IMHO, you need at the very least the Ctrl-D text and some of the social bookmarking sites. Labelling and explaining the socializing links is essential, and the key to whether you get usage or not.

One last angle: any bookmarking prompt, be it links or text, should be treated as an advert. It should be placed very visibly on the page, integrated into the design well, and given enough explanation as to its function. Like ads, images work wonders here.

Pierre

[EGOL]

Thanks for the ideas Pierre! Great blog post.

[eKstreme]

Thanks EGOL.

I forgot to ask: does anyone know of some JS bookmarking code that works in Opera? All the examples I know of work only in FF and IE.

Cheers,
Pierre

[A.N.Onym]

Pierre, you can check the example on my site (sig link). You can try downloading the JS from this direct link.

Alternatively, if you want to dig in and to give credit to the author and such (though it may be present in the script code), you can check the Drupal module.

This post has been edited by A.N.Onym: May 15 2007, 03:01 AM

[SEOigloo]

Pierre, thank you for the link.

I feel silly that I didn't just use your socializer button to begin with.

May I ask a question, please? I noticed that Google bookmarks isn't one of the things in your bevy of bookmarks (unless I'm just completely missing it). Can you tell me why this is? It seems like that's such an important one...and with everyone buzzing about personalization, defensible traffic, etc., I would think this would be an essential bookmark to have. Would you explain why it's not there (unless I'm just missing it)?

What do you think about the fact that we've placed the bookmark in the left nav here? You see, we've already got the tell a friend script there, and it seemed to kind of go with this. I know you advocate putting these things at the bottom, but some of my articles on this site are really long, and there is all of that available space in the nav. What do you think? Am I making a mistake placing this there?

I'd really appreciate your feedback and want to personally thank you for creating this tool. I had read about it months ago, Pierre, and then it went out of my mind. I am curious to know if your icon is beginning to gain brand recognition at all. Do you have stats on how many sites are now using it? And, in conjunction with that, do we need to credit you in some way for using it?

Please, let me know if you have a moment. Thanks!
Miriam

This post has been edited by SEOigloo: May 19 2007, 09:39 PM

[Jozian]

I will be launching a blog soon for a client and we are putting in a bookmark link as well as social networking links using Socializer.

Most of the important bases have been covered by the team here. Nice work.

One thing to add: Non-social Bookmarking can be to Favorites or to a desktop icon. I like the desktop icon better. If you do use a desktop link, make sure you use a strong custom favicon - this makes your link easier to find, and believe it or not, if it's pretty/cool/interesting, it will stay on the desktop longer and bring you more return visitors.

Of course, that means you need to make a good icon in multiple resolutions. That's a whole different topic.

-Jeff

[bwelford]

.. unfortunately, Jozian, the favicon still appears rarely and somewhat inconsistently in Internet Explorer.

I can never understand why Microsoft, the inventor of the favicon, do not make it work the way Firefox does. That's a really big opportunity for making a lot of people happy that Microsoft misses out on.

[Jozian]

Barry- re:

unfortunately, Jozian, the favicon still appears rarely and somewhat inconsistently in Internet Explorer

Yes. I don't understand it either. In fact, my Windws XP system actually loses the icons sometimes too. Very annoying. It seems that XP and maybe IE too? requery the favicon all the time and that causes it to not or drop displaying...

Can anyone confirm that this is what is going on?

-Jeff

This post has been edited by Jozian: May 20 2007, 10:25 AM

[whitemark]

In fact, my Windws XP system actually loses the icons sometimes too.

I think it has something to do with the IE cache.

Reposting here from a similar discussion thread I started ("Links To Social Media Networks, Are they required?"):

Not everyone uses ALL the networks (last count, there were around 30+ popular ones!) but tend to stick with their favorites. And if they are really 'into' their social networks, they will most probably be using the respective plugins (firefox add on or toolbar) or bookmarklets that allow them to add / share sites in their social networks.

So are links to social media networks really required on a website or blog?

Though there are services, like Add This, that try to make this easier for the web master / blogger, they come with the drawback of directing your visitors to another site and confusing / distracting them. What are your thoughts?

This post has been edited by whitemark: Jun 8 2007, 07:38 AM

[Ruud]

In fact, my Windws XP system actually loses the icons sometimes too. Very annoying. It seems that XP and maybe IE too? requery the favicon all the time and that causes it to not or drop displaying...

They store the favicon in the temporary folders. Once in a while stuff gets dumped, among which your favicon.

You can save a favicon to a permanent place. Then right-click on your bookmark and click Change Icon.

To achieve the same with Firefox you'll need the Favicon Picker extension.

My bookmarks toolbar in Firefox shows only favicon buttons, no text. Very easy

Not everyone uses ALL the networks (last count, there were around 30+ popular ones!) but tend to stick with their favorites. And if they are really 'into' their social networks, they will most probably be using the respective plugins (firefox add on or toolbar) or bookmarklets that allow them to add / share sites in their social networks. [...]

What are your thoughts?

I think it falls under the "it depends" header of web design It depends on your audience and on what you want to achieve.

Thinks to ponder:

• how technical is my audience?
• how likely is my audience to know about social media/tagging ?
• how likely is my audience to already be engaged in social media/tagging ?
• do they need encouragement, instructions?
• where do I want to focus my attention? regardless of whatever is out there, what do I want to promote or support?

The latter is not unimportant. What might constitute the better win: 100 bookmarks on one major network or 100 bookmarks divided over 30 networks?

Either way, without answering the questions "what do I want to achieve with this" and "who are my visitors" the answer to the questions you raise remain academic.